Theological/philosophical/cultural/spiritual thoughts about God and the Real Jesus.

Friday, November 06, 2015

Reflections on Chapter One of Philip Kitcher's Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism

I just read the first chapter of Philip Kitcher's Life After Faith. Here are my initial thoughts about it.

I'll probably read Ch. 2 and respond sometime in the future.

Kitcher quotes are inserted between inverted commas.

“In my early teens, my faith began to slip, underwent a
few bouts of renewal, and then disappeared for good.” (K66)

I’m just the opposite – in my
early 20s my deism/practical atheism began to slip, and I found faith.

“The atheist movement today often seems blind to the
apparently irreplaceable roles religion and religious community play in
millions, if not billions, of lives. The central purpose of this book is to
show how a thoroughly secular perspective can fulfill many of the important
functions religion, at its best, has discharged.” (K94)

Note: “orientation.” Does
not this assume there is some destination, some goal to be gained? On a theism
such does not exist, correct?

Will Kitcher try to point us in a direction, as opposed to Nietzsche's directionless, orbitless planet?

“Secular humanism begins with doubt.”

Kitcher demands a reply to
one matter: “The core of secularist doubt is skepticism about anything
transcendent.” (6)

My skepticism is about the idea that all is “immanent.” Which means: physical?

It seems so. Kitcher writes:

“Believers may retreat from
committing themselves to all-powerful creators with long white beards or to
gleaming figures with magnificent wings or to the living physical presence of
someone who was previously fully medically dead, but so long as they interpret
their doctrines as recording episodes that were connected with something beyond
the physical, organic, human world, secular humanists doubt the truth of what
is claimed.” (p. 6)

OK – Kitcher is (it seems) a
physicalist. I have philosophical and scientific problems with that. For
example, “consciousness.”

What evidence is there for this skepticism about the transcendent?

-“We
find an astounding variety in religious doctrines.” OK. Therefore…? NOTE: Alvin Plantinga has thoroughly and rigorously responded to the claim that varieties of religious experience form a defeater for one view (Christian theism. See Plantinga, Knowledge and Christian Belief, Ch. 9.

“The religious convictions of many contemporary believers
are formed in very much the same ways. Often the faithful are born into a
religious tradition whose lore they absorb in early childhood and continue to
accept throughout their lives; sometimes, when the surrounding society contains
adherents of a different doctrine, acquaintance with a rival religion prompts
conversion, and a shift of allegiance. In either case, however, religious
believers rely on a tradition they take to have carefully preserved insights
once vouchsafed to privileged witnesses in a remote past.” (pp. 7-8)

True. Therefore… reality
does not contain transcendent entities or experiences?

And… watch out for the
genetic fallacy here. For we can agree that there are a variety of religious experiences
and convictions.

The common pattern is: “Religious
believers rely on a tradition they take to have carefully preserved insights
once vouchsafed to privileged witnesses in a remote past. Because that pattern
is so prevalent in undergirding the religious beliefs of the present, it is
very hard to declare that one of the traditions has a special status, or even
that a manageable few have transmitted truth about the transcendent. The
beliefs of each tradition stand on much the same footing: complete symmetry
prevails.

How can a devout person,
deeply convinced of some specific, substantive doctrine— the claim that the
world is the creation of a single personal deity, say— come to terms with this
predicament? To face it clearly is to
recognize that if, by some accident of early childhood, he had been transported
to some distant culture, brought up among aboriginal Australians, for example,
he would now affirm a radically different set of doctrines, perhaps about
the reverberations of the Dreamtime in the present, and would do so with the
same deep conviction and as a result of the same types of processes that
characterize his actual beliefs." (8)

True… but so what? Again – I smell the genetic
fallacy.

Since Kitcher mentions the sensus divinitatis, and says an Aborigine might have this just as a
Christian theist might, we would do well to recall Alvin Plantinga’s analysis and objections
here. (Probably Kitcher is responding to Plantinga. if he is, he is failing to address Plantinga's detailed reasoning.)

Kitcher is saying – There is massive disagreement among the world’s religious. Therefore, he is
skeptical of the transcendent.

“Science” – “Disagreement in doctrine is mirrored in
disagreement about cogent modes of religious argument. Finally, a closer look
at the motivating analogy shows it to be broken-backed. In the scientific case,
the methods used to generate and defend the conclusions can be tested
independently for their reliability, and the conclusions themselves can be put
to work in a host of successful predictions and interventions. Molecular
geneticists can do remarkable things on an impressive scale, producing
organisms to order and using them to manufacture a host of medically valuable
substances (for example, growth hormones, clotting factors, or insulin).
Nothing like that is apparent in even the longest-surviving traditions of
rational religion. Instead arguments about the transcendent, including those
directed at establishing the existence of a deity, are presented, rebutted,
refined, and questioned again, in a process that makes no progress, in which no
question is ever settled, in which opinion never converges and disagreement
never abates. No basis can be found for supposing that this process is well
suited to lead to transcendent truth.” (10)

Note: “remarkable” and “impressive”
are not within the realm of science. So Kitcher transcends science in his
explanation.

Science, qua science, says
nothing about value. If Kitcher is to be consistent he ought to remove all
value judgments, and perhaps all reasoning (logic) since the laws of logic are
not, precisely, physical things. (Kitcher is going to tackle "value" is Ch. 2. Presumably he will show how matter produces "value." Will he try the failing route of Sam Harris here?)

Kitcher is, foundationally, a physicalist. So one should
expect nothing less than an attempt at physicalist reasoning.

See this – “Why should anyone, including the religious believer,
suppose himself to have an ability to undergo processes that yield specific
doctrines about the transcendent? With respect to faculties like perception and
memory, physics, physiology, and psychology have begun to provide the rudiments
of accounts of our capacities to discern particular types of facts: we now have
glimmerings of understanding as to how people have causal access to specific
features of the world. For the putative source of transcendent truth there is nothing
similar…” (pp. 10-11)

Isn’t this circular? “Our ancestors have been able to
base their trust on common-sense discoveries. They could check that, for the most
part, the deliverances of the senses cohere, that the properties discerned by
vision are reconfirmed by touch, that the judgments of different people agree
and that a mass of perceptual judgments and memories fit together in a
harmonious whole.” (p. 11)

But see Wm P Alston, and
belief that our senses give us accurate
information about the external world as properly basic; therefore,
non-scientific (non-evidentialist).

We trust in our senses.

We have no evidential
argument for this.

This is because to verify the
veridicality of our 5 senses we would have to assume the veridicality of our 5
senses.

Kitcher has a highly exalted in excelsis view of science when he writes: “Although the appeal to
basic religious knowledge avoids the outright rebuke of definite refutation—
for, unlike nature, the transcendent never delivers a resounding “No” to our
assertions— it is undermined by the vast extent of radical disagreement, and by
inability to explain in any noncircular way how the supposedly benighted might
deploy their supposed faculties better than they actually manage.”

I'm just not sure the transcendent (God) fails to deliver a resounding "No" to our assertions.

I am also not sure that nature is able to deliver a resounding “Yes” to our assertions (the history of science is the
history of error). BTW – “nature” doesn’t give either a resounding “Yes” or a
resounding “No” to anything. All facts are theory-laden (all “facts” are
already interpreted things).

“Religious experiences occur in all cultures…” Might this
be an argument for the transcendent,
even if such experiences are described differently? (See Rom. 1 and 2)

“The [religious] conclusions often taken to be grounded
in religious experience are thoroughly soaked in the brew of doctrines
prevalent in the surrounding society and typically passed on in early
enculturation— an important fact neglected by individualistically oriented
religious (usually Christian) epistemologists in their attempts to validate
“basic religious knowledge.”

Might not this also be said
of scientific conclusions? On a diachronic analysis?

‘I have argued that not all of the full array of specific
doctrines about the transcendent can be accepted as true— indeed, the
overwhelming majority of them must be regarded as thoroughly false.
Nevertheless, the processes through which those doctrines have come to be
adopted are all of the same general type, providing no basis for distinguishing
the wheat from the chaff. Under these circumstances, we should be skeptical
about all of them.” (p. 13)

Wow – Kitcher writes – “The available evidence amply
supports the hypothesis that religious experiences are more likely to happen to
people who are psychologically disturbed or who are under the influence of
substances usually viewed as interfering with clear and reliable perception.”

This is amazing. (Is he
following Wayne Proudfoot here, whom he mentions in the Preface?)

If we are going to use a psychology
of religious experience as a premise leading to skepticism of the transcendent,
then I think we can use NYU psychologist Paul Vitz’s psychology of atheism to
explain Kitcher’s physicalism (absence of the transcendent). And just what
would we conclude from all of this?

Kitcher argues (p. 15):

1.Most
specific religious doctrines must be false.

2.They
all emerge from the same generic style of historical development.

3.It
follows that generating belief in that way is not reliable.

Is P1 true? I think so. But note overlap between
religious teachings; e.g., the “golden rule.” And the idea of transcendent
reality.

Is P2 true? Kitcher has not, for me, done enough to
support this claim. In fact, from my studies of the history of religions, it
strikes me as too simplistic. Kitcher is not a history of religions scholar. So i am skeptical of his claim.

Kitcher declares: “Thoughtful religious people should
have been ready to concede… [and] should have insisted that religious doctrines
are held on the basis of faith, and, if it is apt to see them also as
knowledge, then the knowledge is of a distinctive sort.”

-See
Plantinga’s excellent chapter on faith as knowledge in Knowledge and Christian
Belief.

Kitcher writes: “Faith is
belief that outruns the evidence available to the believer. According to some
religious people, even if religious doctrines are held without compelling
evidence, such belief is legitimate.” (p. 16)

“Without compelling evidence.”

Amazingly (to me), Kitcher
is going to quote W.K. Clifford in a few pages.